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Google Case Study: How to Get on the First Page of Google





On the other side of the world, a young man has added to his blog a post entitled, “Learn 8 Ways of Effective Leadership.” What follows is my response. It's about how he can get his article seen on the first page of Google. I hope it helps him. Maybe it will help you some, too.



Hello, Hunny ...

Congratulations! You’ve achieved a Google Page Rank of 3 out of 10!!!

Would you like to increase the amount of traffic you get, as well?

If so, a little knowledge of “keywords” will help you a lot.

For example, the keyword/phrase for your article, “Learn 8 Ways of Effective Leadership,” is “Effective Leadership.” I will talk more about how to select a better keyword/phrase for your purpose in a minute; but, for now, may I make a suggestion?

Put your keyword/phrase *first* in your article titles ... like this:

“Effective Leadership: 8 Qualities You Can Learn”

That way, when the search engines index your article, your keyword/phrase “Effective Leadership” will be the first thing people see because it is at the left margin of their screen in bold type. See http://tinyurl.com/2ccvco

Also, although you have done a good job of mentioning your keyword/phrase “effective leadership” in the body of your article (I count three times), when you get to your resource box at the end, it is *very* important to ...

(a) put it first, and

(b) make it bold ... like this:

“Effective Leadership: If you will practice these techniques mentioned above, I am sure you will notice the difference on the very first day,” etc., and

(c) make it “clickable” to something, such as ...

If you were preparing this article for publication at EzineArticles, let’s say, then in addition to putting your keyword/phrase in bold-face type, you would also hyperlink it to your blog, FameFire, so that people who see your article out on the web and want to read more of your writing can easily do so just by clicking on your bold, hyperlinked keyword/phrase in your resource box.

In fact, you are fast approaching the place in your development where it’s time to start thinking about publishing your articles in the top article directories!

As you get ready to do this, here are a couple of things to keep in mind:

1) Always publish your original article on your blog first. That way, there will never be any question as to who the author of it is.

2) Say whatever is in your heart to say on your subject and make it as long as you like. Let your readers see “the real you” because that is what they’re most interested in ... your personal spin on whatever subject is up for discussion.

3) And then, when you are getting your blog post ready for publication in the article directories, approach it with the idea of condensing it a little and maybe tightening it up a bit, so that it’s at least 20% different from your original post, so that you don’t run into issues of duplicate content.

4) The idea, you see, is to craft your condensed version in such a way that the reader wants to find out more about what you have to say on the subject ... and clicks through to your blog in order to get it!

Now, I said I would help you choose a more effective keyword/phrase for your article, so here goes:

The trick to getting your article seen by real people who are looking for information on your topic is to pick a keyword/phrase that has some competition, but not too much, and that has some people looking for it, but not too many.

How do you determine how much competition your keyword/phrase has?

That’s easy.

You just go to Google and type in “effective leadership” *with* the quote marks around it.

Why do you put quotes around it?

So that you can get a count of all the websites where that exact phrase occurs.

If you do not put quotes around it, then Google will return all the results for the word effective and all the results for the word leadership, and all the results for both together, and that’s not what you want. What you want is the number of websites that are using that exact phrase.

For example, the term, effective leadership, without quotes, returns 4,750,000 websites with one or the other or both words on them, whereas with quotes it’s only 654,000 websites where that *exact* phrase can be found. And those 654,000 websites are your competition.

And what you have to do is ask yourself this question:

“How likely is it that my little article on my little blog is going to climb right up over 654,000 results and get to the top of the first page for that term in the search engines?”

Not very likely!

Why?

Because your website (blog) isn’t strong enough, yet, in terms of “pulling power,” to take you up to the top of as big a pile of websites as that. It’s only a PR-3 right now.

So what do we do about it?

Two things:

(1) we pick a keyword/phrase with *less* competition, and

(2) we pick an article publisher with *more* pulling power; that is, with a higher page rank ... as high as we can get (see http://tinyurl.com/rmuok). EzineArticles, for example, has not only a page rank of 6, but it is also, according to Alexa.com, the 669th most visited site on the internet, whereas yours is only the 2,172,995th most visited, and the difference between yours and theirs is part of that “pulling power” you need in order to get your article to the top of the engines for your keyword/phrase and seen by lots of people who read it and (hopefully) click through to your blog as a result, which in turn improves *your* rankings and thus the pulling power of *your* site.

Are you starting to get the picture?

Good!

Now that we know how to get *more* “pulling power” by getting our article published by the top article directory on the internet (EzineArticles), we can turn our attention to getting *less* competition.

And the easiest way to do that is simply to add a word or two to our keyword/phrase.

For example, let’s put “effective leadership skills” (with quotes, remember) into Google and see how many competing websites we turn up for that keyword/phrase.

117,000

That’s down quite a bit from 654,000, but not down quite far enough for our purposes. Let’s try “effective leadership styles” ...

33,900

Getting closer! If you published your article with EzineArticles, you might land on page two or three with this one.

Let’s try “effective leadership traits” ...

6,380

Bingo! We just hit pay dirt! Only 6,380 competing websites!

And an estimated 6 searches a day on that term, according to the keyword-research tool I’m using at the moment (you can find free keyword research tools on Google).

And the probability is *very* high that when those 6 people a day type in “effective leadership traits” the first thing they’re going to see on the first page of Google is your article on the subject as published by EzineArticles!!!

Congratulations!

Now you’re at the top ... but there’s one more thing you have to think about and that’s this:

“What good is it doing me to be there?”

Good question!

Unless you have a very tempting resource box down at the bottom of your article that makes a reader want to click through to your blog, it isn’t going to do you hardly any good at all.

How do you write a kick-butt resource box?

Another good question!

But I am going to let you find your own answer to it because that’s the best way for you to learn the art and science of enticing your readers to come to your website.

Hint: http://tinyurl.com/2t9xg5

That’s all for now, Hunny ... except to say once again how proud I am of you for achieving a PR-3 for your blog!

That’s awesome!

Hunny, who is just 21 years old, lives in India and can only work on his blog at night at an internet cafe. We who have internet connections and computers conveniently at home don’t know how lucky we are!

Sincerely Yours,

Elizabeth Adams

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